The next time that happened, I had more smarts and awareness. We went back to the same restaurant, which attracts a lot of sporty people and people with motorcycles. A man had parked his motorcycle on the lines of the handicap spot. So I waited. I knew I couldn’t walk away from everyone who abused these things; otherwise I was not doing anything to better the situation. If I spoke up, maybe an able-bodied driver wouldn’t do it again, and maybe the next injured person wouldn’t have a hard time coming out of his or her car. I realized that the more people I could educate, the fewer injured people would face what I was facing right then.
So we waited and waited for this one guy; it was a frustrating experience. I eventually called the cops this time, and the cop was totally on my side. The guy finally emerged from the restaurant, and he noticed the cop by his motorcycle.
He said, “I was only there for one minute.” That’s everyone’s excuse, by the way.
I said, “That’s not true. I called the cops twenty minutes ago.”
The cop said I was right.
So the cop made the guy come over and apologize to me, but then the cop apologized to me because he couldn’t write the guy a ticket. The guy wasn’t technically in the handicap spot. He was in the wide space between the two painted lines that separated it from another parking space, the space to create room for people in wheelchairs to get out between the cars. I tried to argue that parking on the line made the handicap spot inaccessible and invalid, essentially. The lines are part of the spot and illegal to park on. I was happy the cop wanted to stand up for me, but clearly he didn’t understand the law. The cop said to me, “I will get him for something else.” And he did. The guy didn’t have the correct helmet and so he couldn’t ride off. He was livid and had to walk his bike home. Still, it wasn’t enough.
CHAPTER 19
The Pact
In November Chris and I gradually began receiving a lot of press about our love story and the accident. While some incredible things emerged from that exposure, it was a doubled-edged sword. It exposed the friend who had playfully pushed me to some unexpected nastiness and brought all of the feelings from that night bubbling up to the surface. The unexpected bad part happened over the use of one word, really rocking her world. It was a report that used the word prank. This headline changed everything for my friend: Worst Bridesmaid Prank Ever Leaves Bride Paraplegic and Unmarried. It almost seemed as if some outlets were only interested in overdramatizing my story and not concerned about getting the facts straight. It’s not as if the story required any more drama. In the same news broadcast that called it a prank, they said the pool was two feet deep. They had even called to clarify with me before airing the story, and I had told them the shallow end was four feet deep. By making it worse than it already was, it just gave people more negative things to say about her and the entire situation. Some stories even said I was thrown in. What a big difference one word made.
She had come to watch me play at a quad rugby tournament, along with two other girls from the pool that night. After the match they were in my hotel room, and we knew the story would be on, so we watched on the computer. That was the start of her really having to confront what had happened that night. She couldn’t deny her feelings anymore because everything about that night was now public knowledge, and she was a central character in the entire ordeal. The denial she was perhaps using to cope ultimately only masked her true heartache, which none of us had seen fully up to that point.
As soon as she heard it, I knew immediately that the word prank would bother her. It was a terrible, dumb word, but I didn’t know what kind of impact it would have. It was a really poor choice that left me feeling rubbed the wrong way. I was unaware how much it would dig into her. We talked about it. She told me that the moment she heard it, she was upset, and that the next day she still couldn’t shake it. She said, “They called it a prank. It wasn’t a prank.” She was extremely upset. She obviously had lost sleep over this report. We all knew this was going to be a problem for her and that it was going to snowball from there.
I received a hard lesson in the importance of language. After hearing prank, which I never would have said myself, I was much more aware of my word choice and how what I said would be portrayed. I made it a point then to start using the term playfully pushed, and some of the media actually caught on.
Unfortunately, others began doing stories and the word prank gathered momentum. It became the more frequently used word to describe the night. My friend broke down. That word crushed her. She tried to hold on, but once the national media latched on to the story, her pain escalated.
Just as the story started to spread, she came to me. It was like she was falling off a cliff in front of me, and I couldn’t stop her.
“I can see that you’re hurting,” she said. “I feel like I don’t deserve to be happy and I don’t deserve to have a good life.” The floodgates had been holding back all of her emotion, but that one word opened them up, and it all rushed out in front of us at once. I was saddened and surprised she’d been holding on to the guilt and anxiety.
I begged her to really understand that I wasn’t hurting. I was having bad days and good ones, sure, but a bad event didn’t take over my life, and I was making more than the most of it. I was rising above the challenge, and I was strong and happy as a result.
All of the girls from that night by the pool were athletic. They ran, played sports, swam. That was part of our bond. She said, “When I’m out doing something active, using my legs, I feel guilty.”
I told her not to even think about it, just to enjoy it, that it was okay. I told her, “Be active for me.” I wanted all of my friends to live life like it was their last day. Most tried, but with her it just wouldn’t sink in, and that word wouldn’t go away. Prank. It was the most evil trigger for her.
The media attention that followed overwhelmed me and became a part of my everyday life. In all of this, I was never really angry about my situation, but one thing did infuriate me: the way people spoke of my poor friend. It was awful and unrelenting. People would comment on stories, saying horrible things. Nonstop.
Forget how insulting it was to me; my friend was devastated because the word prank made it sound like she had planned the push and it was on purpose, and that really wasn’t how it happened at all. Notice that whoever wrote the original headline and story didn’t even get the simple facts correct—I’m a quadriplegic, not a paraplegic.
Then there were the thousands of comments in the thread of that particular story. People said terrible things about Chris and sometimes about me, such as, “Don’t have children with her because you’ll have to raise them yourself.” But we let it slide. My friend couldn’t let it go so easily. One person commented, “I’m sure the friend feels terrible and she should. She crippled this woman because she didn’t think.” Aside from the fact that the word crippled was incredibly offensive and demonstrated tremendous ignorance, the writer of such scathing statements had no idea how my friend or any of us felt.
I wanted to scream, really, at the stupidity of it all. It could have happened to absolutely anyone. It’s not uncommon to put a light hand on someone and give them a tender shove into the pool. I’ve done it. The people writing these comments, they must have led some seriously perfect lives and had really good luck. There were of course multiple supportive comments, but they didn’t even cause a blip on my friend’s radar. They were eclipsed by the nasty, evil ones that had so much impact.
The accident just happened. It was scary and random, but to write that she should be crippled, too? It was just plain insanity and judgmental, and I hoped none of these people ever had to deal with this situation, because that was no way to find peace. No one is immune to an accident. All of us have done things in our lives that could have caused injury.
People asked me all of the time if I was angry about the accident. The only time I felt anger about this accident was when
I read crap like this. It was never-ending. I knew I shouldn’t read it all, but I couldn’t help myself.
My friend started reading it all, too, more and more. I don’t know why. But then she began believing it. Even after I was long out of the hospital and on the road to figuring out my life, she kept getting stuck on the negativity, and with every story she felt worse and worse. People wrote that she should hurt herself, or she should be paralyzed, too, and indebted to me. They got inside her head. These evil, rotten people really messed with her.
Early on she was so consumed by it all, worried that people would figure out who she was, that she stopped using Facebook and shut down in other ways, too. We all sort of closed out of Facebook for a while. She decided if she posted anything to me, she was giving it away that she’d pushed me, even by posting a picture. She didn’t want anyone to know anything. I respected that fear and never talked about it at all, not a word.
At one point In Touch magazine became really aggressive, trying to figure out who was there that night and who had pushed me into the pool. They actually went so far as to contact about one hundred people on Facebook who were friends with me, trying to put the pieces together. I had casually spoken with the other girls all along about how protective we needed to be of our friend’s feelings. We all agreed that had the situation been reversed, it would be painful to feel responsible, and in an unspoken way, we all respected and protected that. But the In Touch situation was upsetting. It meant it was time to draw a line in the sand. We had to formalize things. I phoned each girl individually and said, “That’s it. We aren’t going to talk about it.” No one argued, that’s for sure, and we made a promise to protect ourselves as a group and to protect our friend who had been the most emotionally devastated by the traumatic event. It was a pivotal moment. The pact had been unspoken until that point, but we knew we were stronger as a whole than we were on our own, so we all agreed it was us against them. I called her, too, and told her that we promised this secret would never get out.
After that, my friend who was having a hard time with the accident began to call me daily, and during our talks she would always apologize profusely. The media blitz intensified, and she appeared to sink deeply during the day. During every call I’d tell her about all the great things that were happening. By the time we hung up, it felt like she was hearing it and it was sinking in. I soon realized that the lift was always temporary, and that by the next day, her despair would reemerge. I felt so sad for her and was deeply concerned. I could tell that a one-second event had really bled into her being. I think she distracted herself at work, but in quiet moments it was harder on her. I could relate; it was like that for me in rehab.
Eventually, I began to worry our friendship might never be the same. I did not want the accident to get in the way of what would have been a fun-filled girly visit, like the ones we had shared before the accident, but it did. The accident loomed large. Up until then I really thought each and every day she’d turned the corner. One afternoon, seeing me in the wheelchair at my home really upset her. It was before we had had the place remodeled and was the first time she’d visited me there, when it was more difficult for me to get around. Someone had carried me upstairs before her arrival, but I had no way to get down on my own. That meant that she and I would have to stay up there together for the entire day. She hadn’t seen how limited I was before that day. She had to experience what I was living, and she really felt it.
At first we tried to make casual conversation, but it was strained. It was awkward and forced. I wouldn’t say the visit was fun; it was uncomfortable. Not that I was uncomfortable being around her—it just felt sucky being with a great friend with this accident looming there between us. She was hiding what she was feeling, I think for both our sakes. She didn’t want me to feel bad for her, and she didn’t want to face all that was happening. I feared she hadn’t even admitted to herself how much pain she was in. She was a pretty strong-willed person; she and I were alike in that sense. She was putting on a brave face for me, but there had been a lot of denial. I think she just pushed it all down at the beginning. I knew she had guilt, but I thought she could manage it. Maybe she even ignored the stress of what it was doing to her and just thought it would go away.
So at the end of this long, weird day, Chris, my mom, his parents, my friend, and I were going to a restaurant for dinner. It was the Lone Star Steakhouse near my house. It was my favorite restaurant, and I was excited we were all going. I loved steak, and their rolls were so good. But that night, I became so cold from the air-conditioning that I began shivering, and it actually made me feel dizzy. I felt so awful that I had to leave before dinner was over. Chris put me in my friend’s car and went back in to finish eating, and my friend and I sat there for a while so I could feel better. Then we decided to go to Burger King. She didn’t say much. She just experienced it with me but didn’t really know what to do. I remember feeling so bad at the time that she had to see how it all played out. I didn’t want to show her the weakness of the injury. I didn’t want her to see it in my everyday life. But I knew it had hurt her.
One very intense conversation between us was laced with both positive and negative. Today had been great about getting my story out there, and Headline News had, too. After my appearances on these programs, some wonderful things were sent in that really helped me. People sent money through a special-needs trust I had set up, and it was enough to pay for a monthly insurance premium for a year or two. A team from the show George to the Rescue remodeled my home, making it wheelchair friendly, and Lulus.com donated some clothes to help me feel beautiful. But there was a flip side to the publicity.
“What do these people really want from me?” my friend asked about the media outlets that seemed to sensationalize the accident in their reports.
“Ignore them. We are. We’re never letting them in,” I tried to assure her.
She said, “I hope you know, I’m happy for all the good that is coming of this and all the great things you’re doing as a result.”
“Thank you. I know you are,” I said. “There’s a lot of cool stuff going on, and I’m psyched.”
Then we got back to the undercurrent of it all. “Why are they coming after me? Do you think they’ll figure it out?”
“We won’t let them, I promise.”
“I’m afraid of what people will do and say if they find out it was me,” she said.
By the end of it that day, as with most days we spoke, she seemed fine. She seemed upbeat, and she could see I was invigorated by the positive elements of my story being told and all the nice letters and words I was receiving from people. She left that night, and I thought she was going to be okay. But then the next day, and then many of the following days and weeks, we’d talk and it was strained. There was a lot of “How are you?” but not much else. It felt as if our friendship was a shadow of what it used to be like. We wanted to talk more, I knew that much. We wanted to be genuine, but we were trying to avoid getting into the discussion of my injury. So it was always weird, and while generally it ended with her feeling better, the next day the negative feelings crept back in.
I never told her, but as she bottomed out right after that first Today interview, I became really concerned. The shift in her stress was visible. I was worried that if her name was revealed, she might do something bad to herself, like commit suicide. It just felt like it was that overwhelming to her, and she was that worried about it all. The requests for interviews and evil comments with her name in them would have been too much. She was good at putting on a smile, but I could see through her. She didn’t want me to hear her cry, but the spunk was out of her voice. It was timid. She was not at all her usual strong-willed, vibrant self. That’s why I continued and will always continue to protect her. I knew the stakes were high.
CHAPTER 20
Turning Down Oprah
Obviously, the accident had been difficult for my friend to dea
l with. It was tough for all of us. The other girls were always reminded and their lives changed, too. Mine had radically changed, but so much good was coming from it all that I was getting carried along by the momentum. I thought, eventually, she would simply figure it all out in her head and find peace. But with so many people trying to interject and get her story, and all the horrible comments that she couldn’t help but read, it just became unbearable for her. She was terrified of the online bullying that would likely occur if they found her out. It had been bad enough without her name out there.
I remember sitting at home one afternoon in January and receiving an e-mail from a producer for Oprah Winfrey. I was so excited. I was a little mystified, too. Oprah Winfrey? I mean, I knew my story was interesting to people, but I was surprised it was that interesting. I’d watched Oprah almost every day. She was my idol. I knew this was something I needed to share with my friend, so I gave her a call. I thought that good news for me would make her feel good, too, that she’d see these really cool things happening for me and be relieved in a way. But I also knew the attention on my story made her nervous.
The Promise Page 9